My new writing and publishing school is always open, is always accepting new students, and is always creating results for motivated writers. I hope you will join us!
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I am pleased to announce the continuation of the Writing For Pleasure Daily Prompt Challenge with the launching of the second batch of summer prompts!
This “Summer II” daily writing prompt challenge is perfect for the month of July and will begin on the day you register, so you can take it in July or beginning any day this summer. Registration opens today and cost for 30 prompts is $15.
You have a couple of choices as to how to approach the daily prompt challenge:
I know that some participants like to have the prompts paced out, so they don’t see them all in advance and you can do that in my school.
But since it’s summer and folks are on the road and often away from Wi-Fi, I thought I’d offer the download option, as well.
There will not be a competition or instructor review aspect to this challenge. In reviewing the legalities of online competitions, it seems to make the most sense to focus on creating quality prompt challenges and leave the competition aspect out.
I am very excited to be able to use my school to offer courses and challenges. Let the daily writing prompts begin! Registration is now open. Feel free to join one summer challenge or both:
Summer II Writing For Pleasure Daily Prompt Challenge
Summer I Writing For Pleasure Daily Prompt Challenge
Be sure to register for the challenge the day you wish to begin and happy writing all summer long! Coming up next, the Summer III Writing For Pleasure Daily Prompt Challenge. Stay tuned, I’ve got lots of cool workouts for writers coming down the pipe!
Thanks for reading! And thanks for sharing this post with fellow writers! Please subscribe to The Prosperous Writer Blog and sign up for The Prosperous Writer Newsletter, for exclusive discounts you won’t find elsewhere. Take advantage of lowest price discounts now in my brand new online writing school.
If we scream that we want peace, and we are looking for a fight in the process, then we don’t really want peace.
We want to fight. We want to struggle. We want to be right.
It’s challenging to be peaceful when it seems like the world has gone mad, violence has become random, and the world has become chaotic.
But I am pretty sure that humans have always felt this way from time to time.
The thing is, we are supposed to be more enlightened today than we were in the past.
We are supposed to have evolved to a place where we can peacefully say what we need and want, not merely rail more viciously against what we don’t want.
So before you really rip someone a new you-know-what, take a sec and notice whether or not you feel peaceful while you are doing them this little favor.
And if you don’t, try to calm yourself down.
Maybe you need a good cry.
Maybe you need to pound some pillows on the bed…until you can cry.
Maybe you need some quiet time or perhaps you wish to be with others who are also processing their emotions in healthy ways.
It’s your job to tune in to what you need and take care of your needs. The world cannot be peaceful until every one of us learns how to do this.
What we see and hear lately is too much hate, too much ego, and too much righteousness.
Certainly this does not describe everyone’s behavior, but I think we can all agree that there seems to be too much of this in the world right now.
So, check your temper, curb your ego, and get in touch with what you tend to get righteous about.
None of us are perfect. I am calm writing this right now, but all of this advice also applies to me, especially in times when I don’t feel this centered.
No one is asking you to be perfect. I doubt I will become perfect any time soon.
But we are being asked to get in touch with what we think we cannot tolerate and learn how to calmly bear it, so we can all step forward into a better world, together.
There are a lot of things I don’t like, but I like to believe that there isn’t anything I can’t handle.
That doesn’t mean I am asking for bad things to happen. It means I am accepting what is and I’m ready to move forward from here.
Let’s remind each other of this, as we calmly discuss the issues with respect for each other.
Self-respect begets respect and respect creates a ripple-effect of wider respect.
Slow down. Get a grip. Take care of you.
We can soothe this violent streak, but only if we work together.
Only if we nurture peace within first.
The number one skill I recommend for writers is capturing moments. Capturing moments makes you a better writer every single time you write one.
What’s a moment?
Here’s an example.
I am standing at Starbucks this morning waiting for my quad-shot, half-caf, one-honey, with-room Americano and I spy a little girl also waiting with her mother. Her mother is blonde with long curls spiraling past her shoulders. She is wearing a little black sundress and has a toe ring on one of her sandled feet. You might think the little girl, around age five, would be similarly girly, but nope. She is wearing a lime green jacket over a navy sundress and pink puffy Crocs. Her face reminds me of drawings I’ve seen of Ramona in the Beverly Cleary books. The mother is poised and calm. The little girl is jittery and happy. She does not walk over to the counter next to her mother, she dances in an exaggerated fashion, jutting out her arms like violin bows going both ways, making up steps to the music as she walks. Her legs are pale and so is her little square, pig-tailed face, which often glances up with a huge grin at her mother. From the side, I can’t see her mother’s face as it is wrapped in long, thick curls. The way she carries herself seems to want to keep the curls intact as long as possible. But I assume she is looking at the girl with approval, since I am grinning and on the verge of laughing out loud witnessing her childish exuberance. I glance over at woman to the left of me, who is also witnessing the girl. She is somewhere between blank and scowling, which I don’t understand, since the little girl’s joy is so contagious. I look at the solemn woman a half-second longer. Is she sure she can’t smile? Apparently, she cannot. Back to my right, the girl suddenly launches herself from her mother’s side and takes two giant strides towards the Starbucks counter, then pushes herself up on her hands like a gymnast going over the vault, while in mid-air she grabs a straw from the collection, and comes solidly back down on her feet. She pivots and marches towards her mother holding up the straw with a giant grin across her face as though she has just scored a perfect ten. But she is not a gymnast, who would be poised, cool, and collected, more like the mother. She is all spindly little-girl arms and legs, her dancing rhythms are jerky and explosive, her brown pigtails spurt out of the sides of her head like two tiny explosions. She is all girl. No TV or Internet has succeeded in subduing her with articles and videos of how to get a perfect bikini body this summer. No tense mother has shaken a finger at her over and over telling her to calm down and behave. She explodes into spontaneous dance moves and giant grins and vaults over imagined obstacles just like all girls, little and big, always should.
That’s a moment. I did not write it in response to a prompt, I wrote it about something I witnessed this morning.
You can write moments about things you witness, feel, remember, or you can write moments in response to a prompt, which is a way of asking your writer-self to wake up, engage, and respond.
You don’t have to go anywhere to write a response, you can write a response from wherever you are. And since writers are virtually everywhere in the summer time, I created a series of 30 prompts to help us have something to respond to every day.
This moment was a personal response to something concrete. Moments that you write to my series of prompts can be anything you like. I suggest you let them be what they want to be. Just let them flow out. Just be writing.
If you decide to register and join the fun, I hope you will share the badge I’ve included with this post. It’s linked to registration page for the challenge already, so feel free to pin it or share it. You may share what you write in your blog as you write, so long as you do not give away the prompt itself. If you wish, you can share the challenge badge with your posts, but it’s not required.
Some writers prefer to write in private, some in public, some in groups, etc. The key is to write however you enjoy writing most. These are writing for pleasure prompts, after all.
Happy summer writing. May you burst into spontaneous fits of imagination…just like the little girl I saw at Starbucks today.
I always wanted my online school to be a place for creative growth and empowerment and in tune with this mission, I am pleased to announce the launch of the Summer I Writing For Pleasure Daily Prompt Challenge.
This daily writing prompt challenge is perfect for the month of June and will begin on the day you register, so you can take it in June or beginning any day this summer. Registration opens tomorrow and cost for 30 prompts is $15.
You have a couple of choices as to how to approach the daily prompt challenge:
I know that some participants like to have the prompts paced out, so they don’t see them all in advance. So you can do that in my school. But since it’s summer and folks are on the road and often away from Wi-Fi, I thought I’d offer the download option, as well.
There will not be a competition or instructor review aspect to this challenge. In reviewing the legalities of online competitions, it seems to make the most sense to simply focus on creating quality prompt challenges and leave the competition aspect out.
I am very excited to be able to use my school to offer courses and challenges. Let the daily writing prompts begin! Registration opens tomorrow morning, Tuesday May 31st. In the meantime, you can check out the challenge description right here.
Be sure to register for the challenge the day you wish to begin. And happy writing all summer long! Coming up next, the Summer II Writing For Pleasure Daily Prompt Challenge.
Thanks for reading! And thanks for sharing this post with fellow writers! Please subscribe to The Prosperous Writer Blog and sign up for The Prosperous Writer Newsletter, for exclusive discounts you won’t find elsewhere. Take advantage of lowest price discounts now in my brand new online writing school.
[Update: registration for first summer challenge will open on Tuesday and your challenge starts the day you register. So register on the day you wish to begin. In the meantime, happy long weekend!]
Exciting news!
I’ve decided to launch daily writing for pleasure prompts via my new school.
Nobody wants tons of writing pressure in the summer. But it’s really beneficial for writers to write everyday whether they have a work in progress or not.
Remember when I used to do moment challenges via email? Those were great.
This time, I’m going to set the daily writing challenge up in my school instead and each prompt will be a mini-lesson in writing well.
So even though it will seem like you are only writing for fun, you will actually be learning valuable skills that you can apply to everything you write.
I will have all the details by Monday! Stay tuned if you want to keep your writing skills cooking even as you kick back and relax this summer.
What is it about typewriters anyway? Does anyone know why so many people find them compelling?
Like many people, I am obsessed with them, which first prompted me to create my Typewriter Obsession Pinterest page a while back.
Then my husband gave me a broken-down typewriter, which I wrote about yesterday. I shared the before photo and now I’m going to share the after photo, which I turned into a poster for my Etsy shop.
I also had a hashtag inspiration when posting my before photo yesterday. #Icouldplantinthat is a new hashtag I am starting for folks like me, who look at old objects they see and immediately assess whether or not they could fill them with dirt and plant something in them.
I hope you will join me this gardening season in creating unusual garden containers and sharing them by using the #Icouldplantinthat hashtag on social media. No one is currently using the tag, so when someone starts using it, we’ll know they are one of us.
Here’s the new poster. Let me know what you think.
Thanks for reading! And thanks for sharing this post with fellow writers! Please subscribe to The Prosperous Writer Blog and sign up for The Prosperous Writer Newsletter, for exclusive discounts you won’t find elsewhere. Take advantage of lowest price discounts now in my brand new online writing school.
My latest fascination is gardening. Something has clicked this year and instead of a little trial and a lot of error, I’m experiencing a little trial and a lot of success.
Yay. And it only took me…well, never mind how long it took me.
What matters is that my gardens are looking really good and I’m starting to plant in unusual containers again. I always found this frivolity amusing but for some reason I stopped doing it for a while.
Honestly, I often feel torn between writing and gardening. I love doing both. But I can look back and see that when I was writing intensely, my gardening was on the wane. And when I am gardening intensely, my writing is on the wane.
But I don’t want to have to choose. I want to do both.
Recently my husband gave me a broken-down typewriter that someone had donated to his theater department. The Underwood is to junky to use as a prop but, of course there are other possibilities… So broken down typewriter: prepare to become a pot.
When Jason gave me the typewriter, I got the message. Why struggle? Writing and gardening have so much in common. This was the theme of this month’s Become Your Own Writing Coach pep talk and it’s a topic I have addressed before in The Writer’s Workout. I even wrote an article comparing platforms and gardens for Author magazine, Grow For It: Activate & Reactivate Your Perennial Platform Power. It was one of my most comprehensive articles on platform development.
So why do I put my writing and gardening at odds with each other? Why can’t they compliment each other? They could if I let them, since they already do.
All of this was the inspiration for a new digital download poster I created for my Etsy shop. The quote is: “A bouquet is a poem written in flowers.” And the photo is selection of flowers I picked from the garden with my daughter Samantha on Mother’s Day weekend.
If you love words and gardening, you are not alone. If you words and many other things, you are not alone. We are allowed to mix things up, to juxtapose them, to bring unlikely things together. The creative impulse wants to move forward into the new, not have to choose one direction over another. So why not just go with it?
In the past, I have shared lower resolution images of my posters on Pinterest. This time, I am sharing images of the framed poster. The digital download itself is available for purchase in my Etsy shop. It turned out beautifully and I had so much fun making it.
If you like it too, thanks for sharing it with your friends who love words and flowers.
How about you? Do you have things in your life that you put in competition with your writing? Do you need to stop creating friction and start creating something new instead?
Thanks for reading! And thanks for sharing this post with fellow writers! Please subscribe to The Prosperous Writer Blog and sign up for The Prosperous Writer Newsletter, for exclusive discounts you won’t find elsewhere. Take advantage of lowest price discounts now in my brand new online writing school.
I happened to stumble on this blog post by Amanda Flaker while I was on Facebook earlier today.
Empath Vs. Highly Sensitive Person (They Are Not The Same Thing)
I was searching for something else and this network for highly sensitive people came up. Maybe I was already a member. I’m not sure.
I would consider myself a highly sensitive person and I am also an empath. Being an empath means I can and sometimes do experience other people’s feelings as if they are my own.
In order to lead a happy life, an empath needs good boundaries and connections with positive, constructive people. Being surrounded by negative or angry people for any length of time is an empath’s worst nightmare.
Some folks may not realize that they are highly sensitive. Others may not realize that they are also empaths. I think it’s helpful to know yourself and especially to know if these two traits apply to you.
I think most writers are highly sensitive people. I occasionally encounter a writer who does not seem to fit the definition of highly sensitive. But this is fairly unusual.
As you can learn from reading the above post, just because a person is highly sensitive does not mean that they are nice. There are plenty of fearful, negative, and defensive sensitive people in the world.
If you think you might be highly sensitive yourself. Here are some resources that can help you find ways to move through the world sensitively without feeling continually irritated and overwhelmed:
The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D.
The Highly Sensitive Person Website
Sensitive, Watch Preview Of The Documentary
Are you highly sensitive, writers? Here’s a self-test. See for yourself and then chime in with your responses to this post.
I also liked Amanda’s follow-up audio about the differences between highly sensitive folks and empaths. She seems to have some good resources on her site for those who fit these descriptions. She seems quite young to be taking on such tricky topics and this makes me want to applaud her.
I guess what I’d like to say to both highly sensitive and empathetic people is, you are a highly creative person. Your sensitivity grants you abilities that other less tuned in folks may not have. If you can focus on self-expression as a goal, you can move beyond merely surviving and into thriving as a sensitive person. Focus on tapping into what you have to offer rather than merely coping with what it’s like to be highly sensitive. Nobody wants to spend their whole life coping, but just about everyone has a deep desire to express themselves authentically.
You have a lot too offer. We all do. Don’t let being highly sensitive stand in your way.
I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.
If you liked this post, you might also like my recent piece on imposter syndrome that appeared in my recent Prosperous Writer ezine.
Thanks for reading! And thanks for sharing this post with fellow writers! Please subscribe to The Prosperous Writer Blog and sign up for The Prosperous Writer Newsletter, for exclusive discounts you won’t find elsewhere. Take advantage of lowest price discounts now in my brand new online writing school.
If you follow my offerings, then I’m sure you already know that I’m a mom.
I love being a mom and I love serving moms in my work.
Moms have incredible power to inspire a better world through our children.
I love that the work I do inspires moms to improve their lives. And I know that inspired moms raise inspired children. Every day I get to watch the moms who I have worked with have an impact on making the world a better place through their work.
That’s a really good feeling.
It’s funny that I ended up as a parenting journalist because I never really set out to be a parenting expert. I don’t have a degree in childhood education or anything like that.
But I know a lot about re-parenting, as in the necessary work many parents learn to do on themselves as they are also raising children.
A lot of the work I do as a writing coach has re-parenting at its core. I didn’t do that on purpose; it just came out that way. Maybe that’s why so many writers enjoy my friendly, encouraging approach to learning.
Much of what I write about in my parenting articles is about inspired ways of parenting kids and encouraging kids to create a more inspired world. At the same time, I enjoy making the publishing world a more inspired place. I am also making my life the most inspiring place possible for me.
I guess I feel as though the world can always use a little more joy and a little less cynicism, negativity, and drama. And that’s why I created my course, More Joy Now.
As a special gift to moms this week, I’m putting More Joy Now on sale for half price. Usually the course is $30 but until Friday, May 13th it’s on sale for just $15.
More Joy Now is available exclusively on Udemy. I just took the course there again myself, and the improvements they have made to the course viewing experience are working quite well.
You can easily stream the whole class while you make dinner, drive around doing errands, or sit in a coffee shop with headphones on relishing a tasty drink.
The course has mind-expanding visuals, but they are optional for viewing because I designed the course expressly for busy people who don’t always have time to drop everything and watch a screen. You can listen sitting or on the go and you can download the handouts as you watch or afterwards.
I’m going to have a more inspired weekend because I re-took More Joy Now. If you could stand a little more joy in your life today then there is no reason to postpone your happiness. I created this course so we could all have more joy sooner rather than later.
Just click on the badge to visit the course info page. If you like what you hear, I’ll see you in there. And a very joyful Mother’s Day to you!
Thanks for reading! And thanks for sharing this post with fellow writers! Please subscribe to The Prosperous Writer Blog and sign up for The Prosperous Writer Newsletter, for exclusive discounts you won’t find elsewhere. Take advantage of lowest price discounts now in my brand new online writing school.
